Samsung 960 Pro in X99 WS-E?

Hello,

Works flawlessly

See Facebook ASRock (DE) -> https://www.facebook.com/asrock.de/

cmkelly01 wrote: When Samsung releases the 960 Pro, I would like to put one in my existing X99 WS-E. It looks like it will work with no loss in performance, but I would like to know for sure before I cough up the bucks. Will it work properly, and if so, is it pretty much PnP, or will heroic efforts be needed to make it work? Thanks!

Your board's M.2 slot is only Gen2 x4 (20 Gb/s), rather than the full PCIe 3.0 x4 (32Gb/s) interface required by any current NVMe SSD, including the Samsung 960 Pro. So you will have some performance loss using it in the M.2 slot.

You would need to use an M.2 to PCIe adapter card with the 960 Pro, in a PCIe slot that provides at least PCIe 3.0 x4. That depends on the CPU you are using, video cards, and any other cards in PCIe slots.

Next, the version of Windows you'll be using may require you to install an NVMe driver during the Windows installation. That would be Windows 7 and 8. Windows 8.1 and 10 have an inbox NVMe driver.

Windows 7 also has a bug in its installation file location of the EFI bootloader, required for use with and UEFI booting Windows installation. But Samsung NVMe SSDs (at least most of them, the 960 series should have it) have their own EFI Option ROM, so you may be able to get away with not fixing the Windows 7 installation media.

You'll also need the UEFI/BIOS version that provides NVMe support, which is at least version 1.40.

When you install Windows, the installation media needs to be UEFI compatible, which means a Windows ISO copied to a USB flash drive. In the boot order in the UEFI, you must select the entry for the USB installation media with the prefix "UEFI:".

You can also check my guide for installing Windows on PCIe/M.2 SSDs. Sorry, the forum link tool fails with some URLs:

http://forum.asrock.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=1236&title=how-to-install-windows-on-a-pcie-ssd